Mad Men Recap: Season 2, Episode 3, "The Benefactor"

After the fairly ground-shaking events of “Flight 1”—Pete’s Dad dies! We learn the deal with Peggy’s baby! Duck emerges as a full-blown Bad Guy!—I was somewhat surprised to find that “The Benefactor” was basically a standalone with only the tiniest bit of follow-up to the previous episode. But then the more I thought about it, the more I realized something: Almost all of Mad Men’s “big” episodes, “Flight 1” included, are basically standalones. This approach is a reversal of the main TV model of the 1990s, and proof of just how much series creator Matthew Weiner learned from working on The Sopranos.

I recently absorbed most of Maps and Legends, Michael Chabon’s collection of critical essays on genre fiction, in addition to rereading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, so I hope you’ll forgive me for getting a bit academic and pin-headed here. Basically, for most of the history of television, dramas were divided into two varieties: Serials (from Peyton Place through Dallas, Dynasty, etc) and series that were basically collections of short stories about the characters (pretty much every crime/medical/science fiction series you can think of). The main similarity is that in both types of series, the characters never really changed.

Much of this has to do with the nature of the short story, the form that has arguably influenced episodic TV drama more than any other. I’m sure readers of this column will be able to come up with other examples (right now, all I’m coming up with are Ernest Hemingway and John Updike), but sequential short stories following a single protagonist are far less common in the realm of “serious” fiction than in the genre world—and genre fiction characters, like those on TV, are far less likely to experience real change.

In the 1980s, Steven Bochco began to combine the two forms of TV drama, but the process that leads us to Mad Men began in the early ’90s with the arrival of Chris Carter’s The X-Files and J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5. Both presented themselves (the latter more convincingly than the former) as novels for television, with a defined beginning, middle and ending, during which the characters would experience real change and growth. In the interest of luring in casual viewers along the way, Carter and Straczynski established a dichotomy between “mythology” or “arc” episodes—ones which solved lingering mysteries and advanced the larger plot—and entirely self-contained stories. This template was adopted by a zillion other series over the subsequent years (most notably by Buffy, Angel, Alias, Lost and Battlestar Galactica), and while it resulted in some awfully good TV, this paradigm tended to create a belief among TV fans that self-contained episodes are inherently inferior to continuity-oriented ones (with exceptions: some would argue that as the X-Files mythology spun increasingly out of control, its standalones got better and better).

The Sopranos was a highly serialized show from the beginning, and in some ways became more serialized as it went on (for evidence, look no further than the adventures of Vito Spatafore). But with the fifth episode of Season One, “College”, it became clear that David Chase was trying something new—coming up with a self-contained TV episode that would change the protagonist in ways that would be evident for the series’ entire run. Over the course of The Sopranos’s six seasons, Tony, Uncle Jun, Carmela, Dr. Melfi, Bobby Baccalieri and Johnny Sack (in the final season’s superb “Stage Five”) would all receive such episodes. With each one, The Sopranos became less a crime drama and more a portrait of individuals baffled by a changing world—who in turn added up to a community baffled by a changing world. Like light, which can be both particle and wave depending on your viewpoint, The Sopranos was both a serial and a collection of shared-universe vignettes, albeit perhaps one closer to Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology than to Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories or any of Updike’s story cycles.

Which, finally, brings us to Mad Men. In his comments on my write-up of “Flight 1,” Matt Seitz praised what Matthew Weiner is doing this season and connected it to The Sopranos, but I don’t think he gave Weiner enough credit for taking the David Chase approach further than Chase himself ever has. The Sopranos launched a golden age in American TV—Deadwood, The Wire, The Shield...you know the drill—but most of Chase’s acolytes have been content to stick with relatively conventional serial narratives (even if shows such as The Shield took the serial in bold new directions by embracing the novel as thoroughly as Chase has the short story). Only Weiner has seen fit to fully embrace Chase’s vision and offer a sort of fractal drama—one that contains conventional continuity, to be sure, but also one where the narrative model is layered rather than strictly linear, and in which it takes quite awhile (unlike with B5 or The X-Files, which wore their complexity as a badge of pride) to realize that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

This has all been a fancy way of saying that Mad Men often feels like a collection of short stories about the characters rather than a conventional TV series. Strip away the Peggy material from last week’s episode and you’re left with a beauty of a short story about Pete, one in which he learns hard lessons that TV characters seldom do. Prune away Betty’s activities this week and what remains is an equally fine (and equally resonant) double-helix story about Don and Harry Crane.

As its thesis, “The Benefactor” argues that artists often wind up with the patrons they deserve: Leonardo and Michelangelo got the de Medicis; a mediocre insult comic like Jimmy winds up with Utz Potato Chips. But beyond the theme lies a deeper question: Are Don and Harry artists? As Don famously told us last season, SC is “home to more failed artists and writers than the Third Reich”, but despite his jokes about a novel in progress—I’ve always taken them as jokes, at least—we’ve seen little evidence of conventional artistic ambition on Don’s part. The artform he specializes in isn’t making the client (or, ultimately, the consumer) feel what he does, nor is it the simple art of the con. To become the advertising whiz that he is—and to transform himself from Dick Whitman into Don Draper—he had to master the art of the managed expectation. Even those who specialize in such unorthodox art forms occasionally have to suck it up and kiss their patron’s ass, and that’s what Don does when he takes Jimmy and Bobbi to dinner with “Mr. and Mrs Utz” (a/k/a the Schillings—it can get confusing since at one point “shilling” is used as a verb).

Who is Don’s patron in this scenario? It’s both Jimmy and the Schillings, to some degree, but ultimately it’s SC itself, and Don clearly thinks he deserves a benefactor who better appreciates his talents—otherwise he wouldn’t be slinking off to French films in the middle of the day (though by doing so, he’s hardly being a slacker—as with reading Frank O’Hara, he’s practicing the art of the managed expectation by attempting to acquire a level of broad cultural awareness that one wouldn’t typically associate with a suit like him).

Really, Jimmy has it easy—to please his patrons, all he has to do is cough up a simple apology (and while Jimmy may use alcohol and misanthropy to justify his behavior, his instructions to the cameraman make it clear he’s enough of a professional to have known what he was doing). Don has to a) sell the Schillings on Jimmy’s sincerity, b) manage Jimmy’s expectations by letting him think that he’s both smarter than Don and has a chance with Betty, and then c) use his masculinity as a literal blunt instrument when Bobbi threatens to use contractual loopholes to exempt her husband from apologizing (Don sliding his fingers into Bobbi may or may not be a basic cable first, but it’s certainly the most sexually explicit scene Mad Men has offered yet). For her part, Betty has to “merely” string Jimmy along while simultaneously keeping the Schillings charmed. At first, Betty seems nonplussed about the dinner, asking what kind of prop she’s supposed to be—a speaking one or a silent one—but in the final scene she’s unexpectedly happy. Like her husband, she’s just paid her freight by sucking up to the people who pay for her lifestyle—and, like Don, she just did so by managing expectations. The episode ends with something we rarely get from Mad Men—a scene in which Don and Betty feel like both a real couple and a real team.

The early scenes at SC dealing with Jimmy’s disastrous commercial shoot don’t say much about the degree to which Don does or doesn’t see himself as an artist, but they do suggest that a hell of a lot of his SC cohorts—including Roger, Duck and even Ken “Published Author” Cosgrove—see advertising purely as a business. Of course, as we learned when Paul took Peggy on a tour of the agency back at the start of Season One, the creative and accounts departments are just tiny slices of SC. The biggest department is media, a purely business department and one which thus far has only been represented by Harry Crane. Harry’s an outsider in more ways than one among the junior execs—he’s the only non-Ivy Leaguer among the lot, and presumably the only Midwesterner. If his department isn’t particularly creative, Harry himself is—last year, he co-concieved (with Pete) the plan to lock JFK out of the TV ad market in Chicago, and this time he proves himself fairly visionary by first attempting to help out his friend at CBS and then urging the creation of a TV department at SC (that they don’t already have one certifies dinosaur status).

But Harry clearly doesn’t have the patron he deserves—if he did, the promotion would have come directly from Bert Cooper instead of being handled by Roger. When Roger offers Harry $225 a week, you just know he’d have given Harry $240 or $250 if he’d come back with a counteroffer instead of meekly ending the negotiations prematurely. Harry’s wife, like Betty, takes pride in her husband sticking up for himself, likewise not knowing the whole story. What they both fail to realize about their husbands (as does Bobbi) is that being an artist—and obtaining the patron an artist deserves—requires as much balls as it does talent; while their spouses may not be entirely lacking in testicular fortitude, they haven’t mastered the knack of summoning it when it’s most needed.

Miscellaneous Notes: Not too much to touch on this time around, though there are some interesting casting notes. I’ve been a big fan of Patrick Fischler ever since his genius back-to-back bit parts in Mulholland Drive and Ghost World, so it was a big treat to see him in the meaty role of a second string Rat Packer obviously based in part on Don Rickles (if you don’t know Fischler from his movie roles, you surely recognize him from his guest spots on everything from Girlfriends and Veronica Mars to Burn Notice and all three CSIs). And while her blond hair was hidden by her riding helmet (and the role, curiously, is not yet on her IMDB page), Betty’s equestrian buddy is played by none other than Denise Crosby, a/k/a Lt. Tasha Yar of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And while Mad TV alumnae Christa Flanagan obviously impressed Weiner—otherwise Lois wouldn’t have resurfaced as Don’s secretary before getting fired this week—she had better well turn up elsewhere at SC; if she was fired both in real life as well as on camera, that’d be just too fucking cruel. The return of the Belle Jolie Lipstick executive, too, was a pleasant surprise; I’m sure I can’t be the only fan who ID’d him by his voice before we even got a look at his face.

As to the story about the episode of The Defenders, most of it is true: As the New York Times reported on April 9, 1962, CBS was left high and dry when the series’ three regular sponsors—Brown & Williamson tobacco, Lever Bros. and Kimberly-Clark (the latter two are mentioned by Harry’s friend)—bailed on the abortion-themed episode, which wound up airing as scheduled on April 28, 1962. Since next week’s episode spans most of April, everything lines up with the calendar just about perfectly. According to a 1997 Times article about Showtime’s, er, abortive 1999 revival of The Defenders, the episode was ultimately sponsored by a watch company (unspecified in the article) which bought up all the ad time for pennies on the dollar. Despite the controversy, an article at the Museum of Broadcast Communication says audience response to the episode was 90% positive. The Defenders wound up running until 1965 and was later folded into the same continuity as Boston Legal (and a zillion other series) when David E. Kelley retconned a guest character played by William Shatner into having been a young Denny Crane. My one question: Did Weiner et al leave out clips featuring Robert Reed because there were none that fit, or because they didn’t want viewers to laugh archly upon getting a glimpse of the young Mike Brady?

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Just started on season two and I must say, there were a lot of great lines...

"...i';m not sad, my people are nordic"

"we all work for somebody"

"meritocracy within reason".

I just love watching Don take control of situations in the way he does..how betty is barelyy able to stop herself from breaking down, and Harry';s balanced emasculation. The advance on betty in the stable is so characteristic of the powerful and masked emotional responses in this show...I was hesitant to begin season one because of how affecting I knew it would be. Another GREAT episode.Posted by BabakTheOldSport on 2009-08-28 09:33:38

I think we need more about the first Mrs. Draper. Betty was surprising with her quickie hookup. Wonder if Season 3 will have Pete and Trudy trying to get Peggy's baby because Pete is the father? Is Pete going to do something drastic with his little 22 rifle? No, he will come to his senses and realize he fathered a child. Suddenly, it will become very important to him, creating friction between he and Peggy. Sal will fall for someone, a guy of course, who comes into the office life. Ken will find a girl. The merger deal will go belly up while Duck gets his walking papers for underestimating Don Draper. And it's just what he deserves for putting his beautiful dog out into the street! In season 3, I predict: there will be more glimpses of Don's other life as Dick Whitman. More skeletons from his past. Maybe he'll open up to Betty a little about his beginnings. I loved Peggy's poise when she confessed to Pete. He was emotionally vulnerable, instead of guarded when he told Peggy he loves her. Peggy becomes even more skilled and powerful, rising in the office while the men look on with envy, especially Harry. Betty will have the misfortune to run into the man she had the brief affair with, opening Don's eyes to what it feels like to be cheated on. Betty breaks out more, having almost been single. Betty has a riding accident, scaring Don badly. Roger Sterling gets dumped by Jane. His real wife won't take him back.Posted by Anne on 2008-10-30 05:30:00

Excellent, cogent and provocative analysis. I was dying for you to make the connection, latent in your review, between the short story form and the time period in which "Mad Men" takes place. This was, after all, the Golden Age of the American short story, Cheever-time, and let us not forget how big a deal was made in Season One of the fact that Cosgrove published a short story in The Atlantic. On the basis of your analysis, it seems doubly clever, then, for "Mad Men" to be of its time in both form and content, even as it's likewise of our time in form and content as well.Posted by Charlus on 2008-08-20 01:50:00

If anybody determines what the French (?) film was, could they tell us whether there's a scene in it that might have 'inspired' Don's action on Bobbie? Josh - if you love the series and didn't get this one, what can it be that you love about it?Posted by Dick Whitman on 2008-08-17 23:34:00

This blog is a great discovery if just in terms of Mad Men alone, thanks!

I would add, that there was a crucial set of connected clues to some parallel place Don's mind is at in Season 2, all in the first part of the episode:

He is certainly watching a foreign film, not the standard for any "average" American exec, even New Yorker, and certainly not midday, out of work.

He doesn't state he was there when he is later asked as to justify where he was. If he were watching some CBS upcoming vehicle, that would be justifiable.

This missing time is getting him in trouble, due to not being there to keep the chain of events from occuring - a series of events, he now has to correct by re- and un-doing them. And he doesn't want to have to be the firm's voice, AGAIN (last time it was telling the airline exec they don't work with his firm anymore)

He wouldn't except it was due to him "not being where he should have been"..

He (and I think rightly for that job profile) sternly corrects his secretary temp due to her language terminology, when she said she was just trying to "cover for him". The innuendo that he wasn't where he was supposed to be just further infuriated him, and she was sent off for not couching that in some other way, more professionally to a superior. I can imagine nothing different in a real executive situation where he gets such a lousy situation thrust upon him as dealing with that comedian.

The result of this part, in a sense, ends up with him now having the reward of the (temp) Ãœber-Exec Secretary who he won't be able to manage to just find free unaccountable time around that easily. This tension will be interesting.

A split seems to be widening this episode, between Don who is watching this cinematic, and assumably avant-garde work, with NO advertisment potential, while his employee is bringing in a Television show, to try and get ads, updating the firm with a TV dept (which is what Don should have foresight for).

What was beautifully balanced was the private lives of the ad firm reflected in the way two MODERN screening events are introduced - a TV-judgement wrangling on abortion, and a french film on fiction, structure, narrative, war, and memory (assuming La Jetee).

Finally, from what I think has been heavy-handed almost in this episode, but hinted to in others, Don's wife wants to be a partner, and is hungry for returning to "the stage" in what she imagines is her "rights to perform" as well. She is barely managing to contain a line between reality and fantasy regarding her needs, desires and certainly sexuality, but does so to remain true to an idea of power, she in fact realizes she has in her role. This started to short circuit her careful wiring (shaking hands and all) and ramps up from washing machine vibrators on to truck driver "fan belt repair", and now smiling for the cheap comedian, whose vulgarity about the horse-riding set is handled with grace, exactly as she handled the same "asides about her horse-riding society" by the earlier man who tried to kiss her in the stable.

Neither scares her, but brings her to enjoy the game, the lust and of course, as long as she isn't hurt, as in "the model" situation.

This claim to be a "team" is going to make things interesting, just as Don probably wants a way out eventually, she may indeed keep him in the game.

ArthurPosted by Anonymous on 2008-08-16 18:50:00

This was a splendid review, Andrew.

...Sadly, my comment is largely off-topic...

I learned a lot from McCloud myself, during a very formative period, and while there's material to contest in that book, its influence is still felt - and not solely in its chosen media. Working for universities as I do, I see the book taught in film classes, design classes, and literature classes all the time.

Chabon's book (putting aside the breathtaking work McSweeney's did in packaging it) was a bit uneven for me personally, though there was a lot to enjoy. For me the most striking and relevant was his piece on Holmes, which I assumed had previously been published in his "The Final Solution" novel. "Influence in bliss," he writes, and I can't help agreeing with his conclusion.

I'd love to discuss those books with you at some point, as there's a lot of discussion fodder within. One of my personal inspirations regarding narrative was an essay by Hypertext author and new media professor Stuart Moulthrop that was heavily influenced by McCloud's book - http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/misadventure/ - bonus: it references "Watchmen" in structure, which will apply to the film (as it's supposedly shooting panel for panel).

...

So, the embarrassing confession that I have to make as a frequent visitor to the site - I haven't yet had the chance to see "Mad Men." It's sitting in my Netflix queue, trapped beneath a pile of other works that I'm hastily writing off as a sort of "research" for other projects, but I really don't have much excuse. It's actually been the reviews here that have convinced me to grab them up, particularly as (even more horrible confession) I just can't into "The Sopranos," and consider it a pale shadow of works like "The Wire" and "Deadwood."Posted by Michael Peterson on 2008-08-13 21:15:00

ascot: "Do you really think Don and Betty were happy at the end of the episode?"

Betty was happy. Don built the engine and drove the car that was dinner; Betty seamlessly navigated. She was happy in a 1963 particle-kinda way. Or maybe it was the wave way then, and I've mixed them up.

ben: "...no one's nominated "My people are Nordic" as the episode's best line?"

I'll second.

- Did Roger's nicotine jones prevent him from registering Ken's near confessional meltdown, or was that exchange merely for comic effect?Posted by Anonymous on 2008-08-13 09:28:00

I second scott's recommendation of Everything Bad is Good For You, fascinating read... sort of a modern response to Amusing Ourselves to Death.

You can count me in the 'profoundly sad' camp as well, as I saw her again trying to pass it off as "grateful". The song "Lollipops and Roses" (this version by Jack Jones, which won a Grammy that year) was playing on the car radio, and these lyrics had me chuckle:

One day she'll smile, next day she'll cryMinute to minute, you'll never know why!Posted by drake leLane on 2008-08-13 03:15:00

i am totally in the "profoundly sad" camp about betty and don in that final scene.

i have read a lot of criticism about that ponyboy/betty seduction scene in the stable. most didn't like it. but ponyboy set that whole thing up with the f. scott fitzgerald reference in the beginning. that scene did that whole 1920's awkward thing beautifully. i thought it was perfect.

weiner himself wrote this ep, right? (i might be wrong about that) but that was the basis of my interpretation of that final scene.

displayed "happiness" in the reality of "profound sadness."

but then, i'm an engineer by training, so maybe i don't really get f. scott fitzgerald.

that aside, i love to read the interpretations of mad men eps here. and the responses. thank you for your wonderful thoughts and new takes i would never have been ever able to conceive of. (see? dangling...)

i love you guys...

mad manPosted by mad man on 2008-08-13 02:31:00

ascot: "Do you really think Don and Betty were happy at the end of the episode? I really felt they were both "profoundly sad". Both did things they didn't want to do (politeness and kiss ass-ery) to get things they didn't really want (the respect of people they don't respect themselves). I saw Betty's "I'm so happy" as a pure lie, and her realization that maybe Pony Boy was right."

Interesting--I've read a lot of descriptions of this scene on various sites and they're all a bit different depending on who's writing them. To me this speaks well of the show.

Personally, I saw it as a relatively happy scene--Betty was glad to be able to participate in Don's professional life in an active way, to prove her worth (even if it was in a rather mercenary fashion). They seemed more of a couple at the end of that car scene than at any point prior to that in the show's run, IMHO.

Which is not to say they're a healthy couple, but if they keep going this way they could be on the road to being a happy one--a couple of hollow heels looking out for each other.

Am I the only one who finds Betty as mysterious as Don? At first I thought she was a fairly typical sheltered rich girl who found her way into a stable middle class marriage, but something about the tone of her recent storylines suggests she's lived a bit more than I suspected--that maybe, like Don, she once had another identity, and the one she has now is a construct designed to make her feel comfortable and safe, but which proves stifling.Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2008-08-13 01:34:00

I loved this episode as well. I do think Harry should have attempted to open the letter more carefully with the thought that he might be able to re-seal it. Maybe they felt that he was rushing in case someone came in and threw caution to the wind.

Matt/Mark: I can in no way claim to be a Rickles expert, but I've seen lots of clips and interviews (some of which I'm certain I saw over at the Classic Showbiz Blog) and I definitely think he could come across without any endearing qualities, especially in the scenarios shown in this episode. These scene on set showed a slightly drunk, tired comedic actor basically shooting fish in a barrel (fat jokes). The fact that they and him weren't funny was due in part to the tired jokes but also due to the inappropriate setting (he's not in front of an audience). I'm having trouble articulating what I mean right now, but basically I don't think he was meant to be particularly funny at that moment.

Andrew, also be sure to checkout Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good For You if you haven't already. There's some great stuff in there about the development of narrative complexity from Hill Street Blues to The Sopranos.Posted by Scott McMillin on 2008-08-13 01:32:00

Here's another possibility for the film that Don's watching. The audio/subtitles show that the FranÃ§ois Villon poem "Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis" is being recited, which suggests that the film could very well be "La Tour de Nesle" by Abel Gance, which ends with a recitation of the aforementioned poem.

It would be interesting in that the story is based on the Alexandre Dumas play involving Queen Marguerite de Bourgogne, who thirsts for revenge on all men. She uses the lure of sex, ala Bobbi Barrett, to ensnare her victims, but one (Buridan) turns the tables on her. I'm probably butchering the synopsis here, but I do it with the best of intentions ;)Posted by drake leLane on 2008-08-12 22:25:00

Great recap of a great episode. The fact that you (anyone) is able to construct such a piece (and comments) about a TV show reflects the excellence of this series. I only wish Time Warner Cable would allow me to watch it in HD.Posted by mas on 2008-08-12 21:36:00

Do you really think Don and Betty were happy at the end of the episode? I really felt they were both "profoundly sad". Both did things they didn't want to do (politeness and kiss ass-ery) to get things they didn't really want (the respect of people they don't respect themselves). I saw Betty's "I'm so happy" as a pure lie, and her realization that maybe Pony Boy was right.Posted by ascot on 2008-08-12 13:03:00

Another podcast? Sure.Posted by Alan Sepinwall on 2008-08-12 11:05:00

We're 23 comments into this thread and no one's nominated "My people are Nordic" as the episode's best line? C'mon!Posted by Ben on 2008-08-12 05:52:00

Denise Crosby is the trainer, not the riding buddy.Posted by SR on 2008-08-12 05:43:00

A couple of comments:

- I'm sorry, but that "You're so sad" line in the stable scene was so campily melodramatic that it had me chuckling.

- I thought that quick cut to Peggy while they were screening The Defenders episode was a bit too obvious. I would have preferred keeping to the wider shot showing the whole table. You could glean more than enough about her character's reaction when the lights went back and she was maintaining that professional facade, though letting it slip just a little when she slightly hesitates when she answers about whether women would like the show.

- I would have been far more interested in seeing someone much sharper and more ambitious than Crane (Peggy, for instance) getting the measly crumb of Head of Television Department and spinning that into the most profitable arm of SC. I just can't picture Crane using this as anything more than a title on a business card.

- For some reason, Don's firing/demotion of his secretary reminded a lot of what Tony Soprano would do in a situation like that i.e. getting caught in a lie and taking it out on some innocent random underling.Posted by wayne on 2008-08-12 05:02:00

Re: The movie Don was watching: I wonder if it was this. It was an episode of "CBS Playhouse," which ties into this episode's CBS connection and also explains why he was able to watch it in the middle of the day and he was virtually alone in a small theater--maybe it was a screening room?Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2008-08-12 04:21:00

Great episode, and I always enjoy it again after I read The House Next Door and the comments, you know your televisionWhoa--the Defender's episode was also titled The Benefactor? Where else would I learn that, but here.Posted by baylibrarian on 2008-08-12 04:18:00

Hey, Andrew--

Lots to chew on here. I particularly like your likening the dramatics of "Mad Men" to light in that it can be a particle or a wave depending on how you view it; I plan to use that line the next time I get in an argument with somebody about the creative possibilities inherent in series TV as opposed to feature films.

Reading that section of your piece, I was reminded of my own "Eureka" moment as a TV viewer, the episode of "Hill Street Blues" that involved the neighborhood's mob uprising against suspects accused of raping a nun; the police captain, Frank Furillo, made a climactic decision that forced a conclusion while violating pretty much any ethical consideration he was theoretically supposed to observe as a police officer. I'd never seen a series lead do something so despicable (in terms of both personal honor and professionalism); Archie Bunker said deplorable things, but "All in the Family" always made sure you knew he was a decent guy at heart, and soap villains such as J.R. Ewing on "Dallas" were clearly marked as "bad guy" or "antihero," to a very melodramatic extent, so that there was no possibility of your seeing too much of yourself in him. But Furillo had a touch of Don Draper about him. He was fundamentally decent and had a moral code, but you weren't sure where the parameters lay, and he kept doing and saying things that cast his trustworthiness and dependability into doubt, plus there was a certain coldness, a controlling quality (linked to his status as a recovering alcoholic), that rendered him essentially unreachable and unknowable. This unknowability was key.

That character was the seed from which so many great subsequent TV protagonists would flower: Tony Soprano, Vin Mackey, Stringer Bell, Jimmy McNulty, Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock and so much of the "Deadwood" gang, and on and on. It was an amazing object lesson (not just for me, the young impressionable viewer, but probably for the industry as a whole) that as long as a character was psychologically compelling, it really didn't matter if he was likable. I thought of that episode (which was written, not coincidentally, by David Milch) while watching that appalling scene with Don near the end of the episode, basically a sexual assault (with overtones of sadomasochistic invitation--maybe this is another, veiled Ayn Rand reference in a show filled with them? It reminded me of the punishment sex scene in "The Fountainhead"). What is this man capable of? We don't really know. We don't really know Don, and Don doesn't really know himself. He's pretending to be somebody else. Who was he, in between Korea and now? What happened to him? What did he do to himself and others? He's a stranger to us and to himself (to paraphrase a favorite Milch observation about his own Seth Bullock).

The structure of the show (which, you're right, is in some ways a refinement of lessons Weiner learned on "The Sopranos") makes such characterizations possible. Maybe we need to explore this in more detail in another roundtable podcast (Alan, are you reading this, and if so, are you game?) but the neither-fish-nor-fowl, it's a short story/it's a novel structure really frees up storytellers to make the characters extensions of/emblems of their time and place without denying them specificity. One of the complaints among people who aren't fans of "Mad Men" is, "They're an entitled, conservative, white-male-dominated culture on a collision course with the sixties--got it, don't need to see anymore" is not really tuned in to what Weiner is doing. If that were all he was up to, I doubt he would have even bothered making a series with these characters set in this time and place. I suspect he's after something darker and more mysterious, something tied into the intersection of personal psychology and social change: more Philip Roth, perhaps even more Albert Camus, than anything we've seen on series drama; a show which explores the systematic dismantling of and destruction of the authentic self, and its replacement by manufactured images and feelings, the very images and feelings Don Draper is so adept at creating. A show can't go to those intellectual/emotional places without the freedom afforded by the endlessly flexible, simultaneously open/closed, static/forward-moving, micro/macro structure you've described in this article.Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2008-08-12 04:08:00

I am stuck on the movie that Don was watching when we first saw him. I'm not sure it was La Jetee. A woman narrator was reading a Francois Villon poem called "Ballade des Dames de Temps Jadis" (Ballad of Ladies of Ancient Times). The stanza that we hear:

" Queen Blanche, light as a lily, who sang with a mermaid's voice, Bertha Bigfoot, Beatrice, Alice, Arembourg, heiress to Maine, and Joan the good maid of Lorraine whom the English griddled at Rouen; where are they, where, O Sovereign Virgin? Where are the snows of yesteryear?"

Does anyone know what movie Don was watching?Posted by Anonymous on 2008-08-12 03:46:00

Chris-

I've tagged all of Andrew's Mad Men Season 1 recaps. Sorry for the problems in locating them. I'm going through the old posts whenever I can to tag 'em appropriately. Thanks for bearing with.Posted by Keith Uhlich on 2008-08-12 03:08:00

Andrew's recap is up, y'all, and worth the wait.Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2008-08-12 02:49:00

One important observation I left out of the recap by accident: The controversial episode of The Defenders was also titled "The Benefactor".Posted by Andrew Johnston on 2008-08-12 02:48:00

This is my favourite episode so far!

I loved the contrast between Betty's "sang froid" flirting with Ponyboy and Don's voilently agreesvive bending of Jimmy's wife - the episode's climax. ;)Posted by Anonymous on 2008-08-12 01:02:00

RE: Matt zoller's word up

oh, i thought the french film was one of those early louis malle documentaries - but i think you all prove me wrong.

Best episode yet this season...can't wait to watch it again tonight!Posted by Anonymous on 2008-08-11 21:22:00

Have to agree with Matt on this. Loved the episode but felt a bit taken out by Fischler. I suppose he was supposed to be a send-up of a Don Rickles type, but unlike Rickles he had no endearing qualities. I just found him completely unbelievable. his performance really wasn't funny either, his technically poor and rushed comic delivery made the already stressed one-liners completely painful to watch. Not sure why they chose Fischler.

it reminded me of something i thought about with the character of Salvatore. Salvatore is a bit too obviously gay in all his mannerisms to fool anyone, even in 1962. is the blunt obviousness of his characterization intentional?

with the comic, he was just too much of an unlikeable ass to be anywhere near as famous and beloved as he was said to be. just didnt see these types of mis-characterizations (if that is the right term) on the sopranos.

oh, and matt, thanks for noticing the title of my blog last week. a brilliant bit of inspiration on my part, if i may say so.Posted by Mark A. Fedeli on 2008-08-11 19:32:00

Off-topic: the Season 1 recaps are not easily findable from the front page. Tagging them "Mad Men" would be helpful to people (like me) who want to go back and catch up.Posted by Chris on 2008-08-11 18:50:00

One interesting thing about last night's episode (just very quickly): Don Draper doesn't even appear onscreen until almost 10 minutes in (I actually checked the clock: it was 10.09pm when they finally showed him lounging around the cinema). It was a pretty clever way of highlighting how disconnected he is from his environment, I thought.Posted by Feinsodville on 2008-08-11 17:47:00

I thought it was a good episode and moved the storylines along just fine.

Some thoughts.

- I don't care how much of a dolt he may be, it was a bit of a stretch to believe that Harry would be so crazy to see Ken's paycheck that he'd just sloppily rip it open without thinking about how to reseal it (heck, even Lucy Ricardo would know that)

- As I suspected last week, Peggy's new hobby, horses, is a substitute for sex. I loved it when Don demonstrated Peggy's advice to Jimmy about pulling back on the bridleon Bobbie Barrett (using her hair instead) AND it worked

- Enjoyed how they worked The Defenders into the plot--wished the chosen scenes had included Robert (Bob) Reed as well.

- At one point during the meeting with the lipstick company, someone mentions how content "warnings" before programs only make people MORE interested. Which struck me as a little in-joke because of Mad Men's own warning before each episode.Posted by GCCR on 2008-08-11 15:13:00

An extremely upsetting, powerful episode - the last 20 minutes or so (Don's confrontation with Bobbie Barrett outside the bathroom, Jimmy Barrett's humiliating moves on Betty, the subsequent car scene) were some of the most emotionally raw television I've seen in a long time.

I loved the fact that the first half of the episode was The Harry Crane Show - one of my favorite characters and an underutilized player in the first season.Posted by Brendon Bouzard on 2008-08-11 13:44:00

Worst episode yet. What a mess.

It started to remind me of the last season of 'Friday Night Lights.'Posted by Anonymous on 2008-08-11 07:30:00

I loved it was well, for similar reasons as Matt already mentions.

I was thinking the film was Hiroshima mon amour (1959), the still of the hand silhouette makes me think of it, to be specific (one of the interesting flashback scenes from the film). Not sure how it's related to the theme, but watching the one of the first French Wave films certainly works as an extension of Don looking at "different ways to think of things" (Duck's push from episode 2.01,) like Meditations in an Emergency.Posted by drake leLane on 2008-08-11 06:19:00

I think it was "La Jetee," although I'm hesitant to declare that because we only saw it in medium or long shot, and my TV's not big enough to read the subtitles. But it looked like the part that's a "Vertigo" reference--which could be another great double-duty pop culture shout-out, since "La Jetee" is about a man trying to re-experience or re-capture a memory only to be destroyed by it, and "Vertigo" is another imposter story.Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2008-08-11 06:15:00

It was "La Jette", wasn't it?Posted by karina on 2008-08-11 05:47:00

Josh: I disagree completely. In fact I thought this was the sharpest Season Two episode so far--on point in every subplot and scene, with a solid dozen "keeper" lines. ("I miss the blacklist," being one; "We all work for somebody" being another). It also did that "Sopranos" thing of organizing all the subplots around a particular idea or question (in this case, "What are you worth?") but without hammering on it so hard that it took you out of the episode. (At least it didn't take me out.) Even the pop culture references were on-point but not too obvious--the comic asking Don, "Weren't you in Gentleman's Agreement", which points up Draper's look and performance (he's like a worn down, sold-out Gregory Peck) and his imposter status (in Agreement, Peck is a Gentile posing as a Jew).

Bottom line: Loved it. Will probably watch it again right now.

My only complaint, oddly, has to do with a couple of the performances. Fischler was superb in the dinner table scene, but I didn't buy him as somebody funny (which is weird because he's been genuinely funny in other roles). And the guy who played the riding partner (was that the guy who starred in Allison Anders' "Things Behind the Sun"?) didn't really click for me until the second half of the stable scene.Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2008-08-11 04:54:00

Does anyone know the title of the French film that Don was at in this episode? It looked like something Chris Marker or Alain Resnais may have directed.Posted by Anonymous on 2008-08-11 04:18:00

Even his performance couldn't save what was a pretty bad episode. And I'm speaking in relation to other episodes. I love the show with a passion, but felt tonight's was pretty bad (and no Pete :(Posted by Josh Oakley on 2008-08-11 03:46:00